


closer to paradise

by orphan_account



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cyborgs, Dystopia, Metahumans, Panic Attacks, Post-Apocalypse, Queerplatonic Relationships, Superpowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 10:12:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5452925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘cause you fall from where your felt you are<br/>and you're running faster and faster<br/>oh, but the days—they ain't slowing down<br/>and don't you, don't you wanna be there, there right now</p><p>yes, i’m walking closer, and closer now<br/>but not close enough</p><p>hey lovely people down there<br/>let's fill that hole up in the sky<br/>don't be afraid to care<br/>i'm sure you'll find yourself there</p>
            </blockquote>





	closer to paradise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pennyofthewild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pennyofthewild/gifts).



 

 

> **> >> _SECURITY BULLETIN_ —THIEF**, young woman, descriptive age 20-24, slight build, black hair, black eyes, wire glasses, last seen leaving a hardware store in City Central, 15th Street. IF SEEN: report to POLICE immediately, **do not approach.** SUSPECTED METAHUMAN.

 

 

 

Hitoka usually checks her phone. 

It’s flashing insistently, and any other day, she’d check it. There’s something untidy about how these messages pile up, and Hitoka likes to take her time and clear them one by one. There could be something important in there.

But today, her car won’t start. It’s a sleek, silver machine, the latest electronic model that can read her messages aloud, but Hitoka’s never liked how it’s done that, its monotone voice just blaring out of the speakers from the blue. She twists the ignition key and _hopes_ , stares at the thing while it slowly, reluctantly begins to rise up into the air.

“Car trouble?”

A woman stops in front of Hitoka's hovercar, engine shifted in ‘lift’ mode with the propulsion stalling. Hitoka notices everything about her, all at once: her voice is calm, cool, slate-grey eyes framed by thin wire-rimmed glasses, with straight, black hair. She’s dressed in all black, too, purse clutched in her hands with a pretty chain strapped around a thin wrist, tapered fingers and a small beauty mark right by her mouth. She's beautiful.

"Ah, a little," Hitoka stammers, and it's just her luck, a beautiful girl stopping on her way home from someplace, eye caught by her bumbling attempts to start a hovercar—her mother's birthday gift to her only daughter, after several years of Hitoka catching the city's shuttles. Hitoka twists the ignition key again to no avail, grinning sheepishly at the girl as the hovercar stutters. "I don't know what's wrong with it."

The woman shifts her weight, the swell of her hip cocking out briefly as she considers the car and Hitoka's confused face as it refuses to start. She looks unhurried, with a quiet confidence under her voice when she says, "Can I try?"

"D-do you think it would help?" But Hitoka's already sliding away from the driver's seat, passenger seat cold under her hands while the woman ducks her head, slips in where Hitoka was. She’s comfortable there, and calm, and Hitoka tries not to let her eyes slide down the graceful line of her legs while the woman frowns. She taps her foot against the propulsion pedal, and reaches for the gearshift lever.

Something bright flashes in the rearview.

The woman's gentle frown shifts into something a little sharper as the hovercar rumbles to life. She puts a heavy foot on the lift pedal and jams down the propulsion pedal, engine glowing to life under her hands while Hitoka's back presses itself to the passenger seat's fabric. "Fixed," she announces coolly, and Hitoka suppresses a squeak while she coaxes the engine faster. Her mother had said it was a high performance machine, meant to last her years, but Hitoka's never taken it past her local speed limit.

She can hear sirens.

"Do you mind," the woman says, raising her voice slightly, "If I borrow this for a bit?"

The scenery around them looks blurry, Hitoka's hands gripping white against the edge of her seat. _Sirens?! Police?!! What kind of person is she?_ she thinks—almost screams to her face—and swallows, mouth dry.

"Yes," she says instead, and the woman's face finally breaks out into a smile.

 

 

 

But the woman really does know how to drive. She slams down the gearshift as the police sirens grow louder, Hitoka's voice intermittently breaking into a short-lived scream when she nudges aside other hovercars on the road.

(None of what she thinks even remotely makes it out of her mouth: _who is she, she’s gonna wreck this car, she’s gonna wreck my car, my mom’s gonna kill me, I’m gonna die, we’re gonna crash, she’ll die and I’ll die and nobody will be able to explain to my mom how the car’s parts ended up on the black market! My organs will end up on the black market! I’ll be dead and we’re gonna die! She’s terrifying! There are police!!_ )

Hitoka can see familiar landmarks blur by as her car flies through the city: the clinic she goes to for checkups; shops full of items she'd browse through for gifts; and in the far distance, the glimpse of her mother's office, a shiny plexisteel-faced building that looks like a needle ready to pierce the sky. The woman just keeps going—they're about to break through the city's limits at this rate, and Hitoka's never been outside the city before in her life.

"Stop, stop, stop—" Hitoka's about to _die_ , but the woman grits her teeth and gives the car a final push, foot buried against the propulsion pedal.

Her voice is still so quiet when she replies, "Not yet," eyes fixed on the brown, dusty horizon. There’s nothing out there, nothing but blank desert; no water, no electricity, nothing at all that’s fit for a human to use for survival. It’s death out there, for humans to leave cities at all, and Hitoka grips at the edge of her seat, knuckles whitening as the hovercar barrels toward the empty landscape.

The police cars operate on the city grid, and when the woman blows past the city's boundaries, they stop. Out of juice. Hitoka's hovercar is a top-of-the-line thing, and she'd always felt it was too impressive for her, but the woman uses it all—even its auxiliary engine while the main propulsion engine heaves in protest. "Did we lose them?"

Hitoka peeks back behind her, adrenaline threatening to blur together every color in her line of sight. The city skyline is slowly receding, eaten up by the brown wasteland around its green oasis as she watches, words trapped in her throat. "Yes," Hitoka breathes, and looks back at the woman. Her shoulders slacken, hands dropping from the steering wheel. She takes a few deep, shuddering breaths before turning the engine off. "I borrowed it a bit far," she says apologetically, and pats the dashboard once. "But it's a great car."

Hitoka pinks in the face, even if she hasn’t done anything at all, and watches as the woman pushes the door open, gets out of the car in a single, graceful motion. She looks at ease here, despite the stark contrast of the verdant city and _here_ , the no man's land. She's almost about to leave, turn on her heel and walk away, when Hitoka scrambles back to the driver's seat, body soaking up the residual warmth.

"Um," Hitoka starts, and coughs. "Where are you going, after this?"

Surprised, the woman's face blossoms into a sweet, gorgeous smile, eyes fixed on the wide horizon. "Farther than this." She clutches the purse at her wrist and it’s almost as if someone’s taken an image of her and transplanted it to the desert, this well-dressed city girl who drives at a million kilometers an hour. An impossible beauty.

“Oh.” Hitoka swallows, throat as dry as the land around her. “Um. Would—would you like a ride?”

 

 

 

The woman is quiet while Hitoka drives. Her car works again, as perfectly as the day her mother had brought it home: its transmission is almost _liquid_ in how perfectly it shifts, and Hitoka’s never felt better about driving before in her life.

Well, she’d feel better without the residual ( _policedeathchasecrashaccidentpolice_ ) adrenaline raking across her nerves. The woman doesn’t say a word while she sits in the passenger seat, Hitoka’s arms at perfect parallels and her spine upright and rigid. She can feel her eye wandering over to look at her silent, sharp-nosed profile as she raises a hand, tucks a stray lock of black hair behind her ear. Hitoka forces her gaze back to the wide, open stretch of unpaved desert ahead.

The land outside the cities is all unknown; Hitoka’s heard in school that they used to be populated, but after so many generations, nothing grew. She’s seen how it used to look, long acres of green and golden waves of what looks like water, tall mountains with white peaks, dusted like sugar, but there’s nothing like that here.

In the wasteland, nothing moves, save for a line of crows dotting black against the sky.

Hitoka’s voice trembles. Her eyes just can’t seem to leave the shape of the woman’s face, how her pointed chin and her sharp grey eyes look at the landscape; Hitoka feels so small, and as if she’s about to break apart, from adrenaline and the sheer terror of being near such a beautiful, dangerous woman. “Who _are_ you?” The question escapes her before she can catch it.

The woman blinks. Hitoka tries to remember how to breathe. “Kiyoko. I’m Shimizu Kiyoko.”

“Kiyoko-san,” Hitoka repeats quietly, for herself. To very possibly make a habit of saying it aloud. “Kiyoko-san.”

She almost looks as if she’s about to smile. “And you?”

“Ah—” Hitoka tries to bow, still driving, and takes her foot off the ‘lift’ pedal entirely by accident, the car scraping against the ground in a brief, jolting bump. “Yachi Hitoka,” she sputters— _lift, lift, oh no, oh no_ —“Um, pleased to meet you!”

This time, the curl of Kiyoko-san’s mouth looks real. “Likewise.”

 

 

The hovercar’s almost out of juice when Hitoka can _see_ it, the low, flat shape of something breaking the horizon. Kiyoko-san had stayed quiet throughout, for hours, and it’s almost as if Hitoka had driven in a straight line, from the city limits to where they are now—as the crow flies, direct and true.

Kiyoko-san gives a long exhale at the sight. “Thank you,” she murmurs. Hitoka can’t see it, but it’s almost as if she’s nervous herself. “I was in a hurry today,” she continues, and tears her eyes away from the low, long compound and gifts Hitoka with a small smile.

Through some miracle, Hitoka doesn’t crash the car while she blinks the light away from her eyes. Kiyoko-san is already getting out of the car, door ajar while she stands and dusts out the creases in her clothes, from hours of travel.

The desert air is different to breathe, and it takes Hitoka a few seconds just to realize what it even is: it’s dryer, and thinner somehow, her lungs expanding large without enough oxygen to suck in. She can hear footsteps, and some kind of metallic echo, and before she can even ask after it Kiyoko-san’s voice cuts through the confusion on her head, “Hitoka-chan?”

As Hitoka trips out of the car, legs shaky from hours of driving, she can hear the footsteps thudding louder: someone running. "It's Kiyoko-san!" Hitoka can hear the footsteps and their echoes clank to a dead halt, and—

—in her defense, she's had a long day.

The young man who greets them has a loud voice, and a bright, cheerful face; dressed in black, like Kiyoko-san, he looks entirely normal save for the addition of a second face, an entire human head rendered in metal and plastiflesh tucked beneath the crook of his elbow. Kiyoko-san opens up the little purse she’s had since the start and tosses a metallic object in a perfect arc toward the boy with the fake head, “Here.”

He catches it with both hands and an awed exhale, dropping the fake head to the floor with a metallic _clank_. "Yuu, ya dropped me," it says angrily, not a fake head at all, rolling to a stop at Hitoka's feet. It fixes angry eyes on her face instead, expression shifting from annoyance to surprise. "Hey, who are you—"

Hitoka faints.

 

* * *

  

"She's awake?!"

Hitoka mumbles, _five more minutes, please_ and tries to roll over, the narrow cot holding her too thin to feel like her bed at all. "Oh, yeah, she's gonna fall—"

She rolls right off and lands on a hard, packed-earth floor. "?!"

Someone waves at her as Hitoka slowly registers her surroundings. "Hi." Hitoka rubs at her eyes, blinking the last shreds of sleep from them as she tries to register what it is that she's seeing. Elfin face, pointed chin, round, curious eyes, and a bright shock of yellow hair in a spiky nest of brown. He looks normal, albeit with a rough-edged shirt with the homemade slogan _HE CAN LIFT ME_ puzzingly written on it, with one face and no heads under his arm.

"Hello," Hitoka begins, cautiously, and he offers her a hand up with an incandescent grin.

When she takes it, he moves his elbow inward, pulling her up effortlessly, without leverage. Hitoka practically rockets back up to her feet, and he releases her hand and bounces on his heels. "Saeko-nee is looking for you," he says, and leaves her standing there, feet a measured, confident gait as he half-runs out the door, calling, _Saeko-neesan, she's awake!_

 

 

 

Tanaka Saeko is entirely unexpected.

"Sorry about them," she starts, waving her hand vaguely at the wild ruckus around her.

The entire compound is just one large, three-sided square of a house, low-ceilinged—for _explosions_ , Saeko-san had explained—and dimly lit. Hitoka can hardly see this way, but the floor is clean and empty, solidly packed earth under her shoes throughout. It all leads to a smaller courtyard and the huge beyond, the brown wasteland where nothing grows; Hitoka swallows at the sight, and the two figures wrestling on it, trading furious punches as the sun glistens on metallic arms and legs.

The same face that Hitoka's seen before, tucked under someone's arm, is laughing while yelling insults. It's attached to a body this time around, a handpainted slogan that says _I CAN LIFT HIM_ marching down a bared, metal chest. He doesn't pull his punches at all, and the spiky-headed boy does nothing back at all, dodges around the metal fist streaking toward his skull and Hitoka covers her eyes, waits for inevitable death to come. "You missed me, Ryuu! Try again!"

The metal-limbed one roars back a challenge, with a human voice, plastiflesh looking so real despite the metal fittings on his joints; he's not human at all, or maybe just partway there, and Saeko-san notices Hitoka staring before she herself can avert her eyes from the sight.

"My little brother," Saeko-san says, by way of explanation. "You came in with Kiyoko-san?"

Hitoka's head snaps up at her name, waving her hands as she hastily manages, "Ah, well, I, um. I gave Kiyoko-san a lift."

"Yeah?" Saeko-san crosses her arms, watches while her brother starts on another barrage of punches toward the laughing boy. "You probably think he's the odd one out," she hums.

"Ah—"

There's a fierce light in Saeko-san's eyes that looks like pride. "You're from the city, aren't you?" And she jabs a thumb against her ample chest, grins at the small, jerky nod that Hitoka gives. "Then you haven't ever seen anything like us before. Or Ryuu. My brother." The laughing boy ducks a punch, but catches her brother's steel-reinforced foot right in his stomach. Hitoka sucks in a breath out of sheer reflex, clutching at her ribs in sympathetic pain while Saeko-san adds, "Or him." She cups her hands around her mouth and merrily shouts, "Yuu! Slug him back!"

Yuu-san is fine, and where there should be broken bones and blood spitting from his mouth, there's just a delighted roar. Hitoka's mouth gapes open as she watches him spring back up, as if he'd never been kicked down at all, and crash his skull against a metal one, roaring, "Ryuu! Nice!"

"Metahuman," Hitoka breathes, and Saeko-san nods. "People who look like people," she adds, and clamps her mouth shut to close off the rest of the phrase, _but aren't_.

"But aren't?" Saeko-san grins crookedly. Hitoka jolts. "No, I'm not one. I'm not psychic, or anything like that." She spreads her hands and wiggles her fingers, burn marks mottling the skin of her hands: they're worker's hands, used to flame and heat and metal. "Just talented."

Hitoka can breathe again.

"We know what you think of us, is all." Saeko-san shrugs. "All of us, out here in the desert." Yuu-san's feet land solidly on the ground, and the courtyard is beginning to look like the inside of the house; Hitoka can see it, Yuu-san running and the earth tamping itself down under his invulnerable feet. When he flips out of harm's way again, Saeko-san's brother tackling him down midair, the imprint of one impossibly durable hand remains marked in the earth.

Hitoka’s stomach growls. Saeko-san’s laughter sounds like her Ryuu-san's, a higher echo of it, rich and loud, boisterous in Hitoka’s ear as she claps a friendly hand against Hitoka’s shoulder.

“Hungry?”

 

 

 

Ryuu-san doesn’t eat.

Hitoka chews at the tuber-filled soup, the flavor something she’s never had before, with a newfound appreciation. “She hasn’t eaten since you stole her car, Kiyoko-san.” Saeko-san clucks her tongue, and refills the bowl.

Kiyoko-san’s face wears an odd, soft shade of pink as she ducks her head down, studies the metal table’s surface. “Sorry,” she says, and Hitoka tries not to choke on her food.

“No, no, not at all—” and she drops her metal spoon in the bowl. Ryuu-san laughs.

“It’s okay,” he says, and his shiny head reflects light as he nods sagely, thick metal forearms folded across his chest. “Kiyoko-san has that effect on all of us.”

“Yeah,” Yuu-san adds, looking up from his own bowl. “She’s our goddess.” He claps his hands together in prayer at Kiyoko-san’s direction, grinning, and accidentally flattens his spoon. “Oops.” He studies it, eyeing the spoon in Hitoka’s hands like he’s about to solve a puzzle, and presses his thumb in the wide, two-dimensional oval of it. “Fixed it!”

Hitoka blinks. _Metahuman,_ and it’s not like she doesn’t know—but seeing the real thing is so different, Yuu-san and his casual invulnerability. Kiyoko-san had looked that way too, when she’d fixed Hitoka’s car, like it was nothing at all.

She’s never eaten dinner together with anyone at all, not since she was a baby. Hitoka’s too young to remember, but she knows her mother had taken some time off, when she was born, and gone back to work when Hitoka could walk. But it’s nice, the clank of Ryuu-san’s joints and Yuu-san slurping the last of his food down as Hitoka finishes her own, Kiyoko-san pushing back her chair to leave. “I’ll take your bowl,” she offers, and Hitoka wipes her mouth before staring at her face, nodding. There’s a warm brush between fingers, and Kiyoko-san is gone again, collecting Yuu-san’s without a word.

“No! Kiyoko-san! We’ll help you out!” Ryuu-san is already up and running, and Hitoka watches as Yuu-san follows, the clank of their footsteps understandably metallic now.

Alone in the sudden quietude, Hitoka takes a deep breath, and fumbles for her bag.

Her handkerchief is still neat, one particular corner crumpled up from where Hitoka had last left it; it’s the only reminder of yesterday, and Hitoka tries to smoothe it out, choosing rather to lick at the corners of her own mouth rather than use it.

All Hitoka has left in her bag now is a small notebook and a humble set of colored pencils; an old-school camera, her first major purchase to herself; her mother’s business card. The only reminds of the life she’d left behind when Kiyoko-san had stolen her, and the car, away—and it feels like that’s the life that most closely resembles a dream.

On the clean, slightly dented metal table—souvenirs from Yuu-san, no doubt—Hitoka opens up her notebook to a clean page, her hands shaking too much to even contemplate using her camera.

Saeko-san is all curves, from the cut of her hair to the roundness of her body; she’s laughing, in the exact way that she’d looked to Hitoka’s eye when she’d seen Yuu-san get kicked in the gut, head thrown back with her mouth open. Her hands shake less as she thinks about it, Saeko-san looking delighted at the surefire punches her brother had thrown. She probably, Hitoka realizes, does some kind of maintenance, and shades in the outline of her fingers, mottled and rough.

Hitoka drops her pencil when Yuu-san pops his head back in the room. “Saeko-nee says you can use the same bed you were sleeping in before,” he informs her cheerfully, and runs back out.

 

 

 

But Hitoka can’t sleep. It’s not that the cot is uncomfortable—and it sort of is—and it’s not that it’s cold—which it’s not. Hitoka pushes back her thin blanket ( _“No, no, it’s okay, you can take it,” Ryuu-san had insisted, wearing a broad smile as he offered her a folded length of fabric with both hands_ ) and leaves the small, dark room she’s been trying to sleep in to find a way outside.

The sun’s set, leaving behind a dark violet sky and heat still radiating off the desert landscape. The entire place is easy to navigate, but it’s strange to see and hear it so silent—even Ryuu-san is offline, and Hitoka’s surprised to see someone awake, a floodlight switched on in the courtyard as a small, slight figure hunches over Hitoka’s hovercar.

Kiyoko-san’s stopped working, staring up at the stars with her hands stilled, the hood of Hitoka’s car framed open with the propulsion engine slightly in pieces.

Hitoka’s heard that, years ago, the sky was a clearer kind. That people drew pictures among the stars, and that they were more than the faint, glittering dots in the far distance—that they were different colors, even. She shades her eyes from the floodlight and squints up to look at what it is that Kiyoko-san sees, trying to filter out the sight of blue-tinged clouds netting the sky, blocking most of the stars from view.

 

“It’s nice out,” Kiyoko-san says softly, and there’s nobody else in the courtyard at all but the two of them. She can’t have meant that for anyone else. “They remind me of something,” Kiyoko-san clarifies, tipping her head back even further. “Diodes look like that, sometimes.”

There’s a quiet grace there that Hitoka can’t capture, by camera or by sketch, but she wants to try. “Diodes,” Hitoka echoes, and traces with her eyes the profile of Kiyoko-san’s face, and the subtly bright wonder there.

“Mm.” When Kiyoko-san stops stargazing, the only thing left in the courtyard to look at is Hitoka herself, Kiyoko-san's hands still buried in the guts of Hitoka’s car.

Caught staring, Hitoka tries to smile. She fumbles with the hem of her shirt and diverts her gaze from Kiyoko-san’s face as she steps closer, mumbling, “Would you like a hand?”

 

 

 

Kiyoko-san doesn’t need much in terms of assistance. At least, to Hitoka’s eyes, it doesn’t look like it: she’s still measured, and quiet, metahuman’s fingers soldering together pieces of metal without any tools. Hitoka doesn’t know what part goes where at all, and Kiyoko-san does it with an assuredness that’s written in her genes.

“How,” Hitoka manages, when the scent of burning metal assails her nose. She coughs, air rancid in her mouth as if she can taste the solder. Kiyoko-san winces apologetically, puts down the steel tubing in her hands. “No, it’s okay, I’m fine—” and Hitoka waves the scent away, breathing deep.

“I gave it a rough time earlier.”

Hitoka knows what she means: the hours when they’d driven the car far beyond the city limits and Kiyoko-san had, in effect, accidentally stolen Hitoka away too, in her car.

Kiyoko-san regards her so solemnly, gently, as Hitoka breathes out the last of the metallic air. “What were you doing there that day?” she asks, and claps her hands to her mouth, eyes wide and mortified.

“I,” Kiyoko-san starts, and colors. “There’s a boy,” she says instead. “Hinata-kun needs something. For his legs.” She rummages around the insides of the hovercar. “He’s like Ryuu-kun, sort of. And it’s hard to find parts for them, but in the city—I just. I look normal.”

“So does Yuu-san,” Hitoka replies, and it’s worth it to see Kiyoko-san’s smile as she considers it, Yuu-san rampaging through the city streets with his cheerful, effortless oddities. “Maybe not,” she amends, and Kiyoko-san’s quiet giggle makes Hitoka lightheaded, feel strange.

“Michimiya says that about him, too,” Kiyoko-san laughs, and sobers when the words fall from her mouth. “She’s like Hinata-kun. And Ryuu-kun.”

Feeling oddly brave, Hitoka inches closer to Kiyoko-san, curious about her, about the metal people she knows, _cyborgs_. “Can,” she hesitates. “Can you tell me about them?”

“All of them?” Kiyoko-san bolts together the propulsion engine again, begins dismantling the ‘lift’ half of the car. “Hinata-kun is new to this, I think. He’s younger than Yuu-kun and Ryuu-kun, and he has a little sister.”

Hitoka absorbs it all, trying to imagine a cyborg boy with metal legs and a human child. “Kageyama-kun gives him a hard time,” she continues. “But Tsukishima-kun might be helping him sleep, I hear.” Kiyoko-san lifts up a complicated looking piece of machinery, flat discs and tubes intertwined together; she sets it aside and dives back in, fingers deft in the little hollow she’d created. “This place, the desert, it’s not good for the car. It makes sludge in the engines. Clogs up everything.” She uncaps something, and a slow, thick liquid pours out from the car in lazy drips. “The car didn’t like that very much.”

“Oh.” Fascinated, Hitoka watches as Kiyoko-san waits the car out.

“And Michimiya, she’s.” Kiyoko-san refits the cap in the engine’s hollow, dismantles even further what she’d taken out from the car. “She’s like Ryuu-kun,” she repeats. Her hands shake a little as she takes it all apart, little nuts and bolts arranged thoughtlessly down on the packed earth—but Hitoka would bet that Kiyoko-san knew precisely what she was putting down, order apparent even in the chaos of her hovercar’s engines. “And she’s where he used to be. People—people who live in the city, who think I’m just like them when I’m there—she’ll be scrap soon, and—” Kiyoko-san’s eyes are large and fearful, and Hitoka cannot _breathe_ , “And she needs to get out of there—”

“You’re breaking her out of jail,” Hitoka manages, and Kiyoko-san stops working. “You’re breaking her out of _jail, Kiyoko-san, you’re orchestrating a jailbreak_ —”

The word itself avoids her mind, and Hitoka can’t breathe for it; everything is so bright around her all at once and her eyes are open, but she can’t see anything at all. Her body seizes up, locks itself shut and it’s like she’s in the car again, sirens in the distance, Kiyoko-san a stranger—everywhere, nothing but strangers—death imminent in her sights and the word, _jailbreak_ , her mother hasn’t seen her in hours, soon to be days. Hitoka is gasping for air and she can’t get any, sketchbook people half-finished in a nightmare so real it’s hard to tell if she’s dreaming, or awake, the word, and a soft voice repeating it, repeating something in her ear.

 _Hitoka-chan_ , a voice like calm water—Kiyoko-san’s hands an even pressure against her arms, gripping her tightly, holding her to earth, panic roaring behind Hitoka’s eyes after so long. She’ll wake up and go back to her life in the city again, and never see someone like Kiyoko-san again, or metahumans, or cyborgs, or miracle boys with metal legs.

Kiyoko-san’s head is buried against her chest, forehead pressing against the thud of her weak-hearted soul, wet voice whispering quietly, _don’t leave me, i can’t fix this, don’t leave me, hitoka-chan_ —and Hitoka would apologize, but she has no air to breathe and no strength to say it to Kiyoko-san’s face.

 

 

 

But after hours, the horizon breaking from a dark sky to pale dawn, Hitoka comes back.

There’s machine grease smeared around her arms and hands, as if she’s the one who’s been fixing her car all night. The hovercar’s engines are scattered around them, courtyard still empty of anyone but Kiyoko-san and herself. Her head is tucked against Kiyoko-san’s lap, and the pale sky outside is already growing hot.

“Hitoka-chan?” Kiyoko-san’s voice is so timid. She looks exhausted.

Hitoka thinks about the handkerchief tucked away in her bag. Kiyoko-san looks like she could use it. “I’ll go with you,” she says, voice hoarse; she must have cried.

“To—”

Hitoka pushes herself upright, cheek still warm from Kiyoko-san’s lap. There’s a rare power that makes her hands stop shaking—the desert is a strange place, full of strange people, and Hitoka looks Kiyoko-san in the eyes, almost as if she’s brave. Takes a deep breath. “Wherever.”

 

* * *

 

 

The early morning’s covered nearly everything with dew.

“Chikara-kun, you’re _good_ ,” Saeko-san says, impressed. She has both hands on her hips, watching a sleepy-eyed young man draw up every drop of moisture in the area, ice already forming between his hands.

Hitoka and Kiyoko-san both straggle back into the house as he hands Saeko-san the neatly formed block, Kiyoko-san ready to sleep. Her weight rests heavy against Hitoka’s shoulder, Hitoka's arm wrapped around her waist. “Kiyoko-san, hello,” the sleepy-eyed boy calls, and Kiyoko-san nods tiredly.

Saeko-san puts the block of ice down in a large, homebuilt cooler. “Up late?” she grins.

“Ah, she was fixing my car,” Hitoka starts, and Saeko-san studies them both. “And, um, yes?”

“I see,” Saeko-san says, with the voice of someone who sees more than she suggests. The icemaking boy is already drawing up another block, clearing his throat.

Hitoka is so, so grateful for the kindness of strangers.

“Here you go,” and the block he hands her is smaller, but it’s still water, the rarest desert commodity. Distracted, Saeko-san tucks it down in the cooler with the rest while Hitoka gets Kiyoko-san back to bed.

“He’s one of us,” Kiyoko-san says under her breath, the words slipping so neatly into Hitoka’s ear. “He’ll help us get Michimiya out, when her day comes.”

Kiyoko-san sleeps on the same kind of thin cot that Hitoka does, and the blanket she uses is a dulled orange shade, still soft to the touch. “And when it does,” Hitoka says, as Kiyoko-san settles herself down, “I’m going with you, too.” She pulls it over Kiyoko-san’s legs, her chest, and her smile is a nervous-edged split of her mouth that makes Kiyoko-san smile back, somehow, sleepy and tired, exhausted from caring.

When Kiyoko-san sleeps, Hitoka steals back to her room, picks up her bag and comes back to sit next to her again. To watch over her the way Kiyoko-san had done, glasses askew on her face in sleep. Hitoka carefully plucks them off and folds them in her hands, places them in her bag.

She doesn’t sketch, but her hands rifle through the familiar contents of her purse anyhow, fingers brushing against her camera. Her mother’s business card is an old-fashioned, thick piece of cardstock, her mother’s eye for detail so obvious in the raised edges of its letters.

 _Dear mom,_ Hitoka thinks, and rubs her thumb over her name, the title underneath. She’s always such a busy lady, with so many people reliant on her and her talents; Hitoka loves her for it, wonders what she’d say about Saeko-san, about Kiyoko-san. What she’d say about the state of the car, and Hitoka missing for days. _The wasteland is full of people._

 

 

 

Kiyoko-san looks better when she’s slept, and Hitoka’s nodded off herself in the meantime; when she wakes, Kiyoko-san is looking for her glasses.

“Oh, here,” and she passes them to her, fingertips soft in their brief contact.

“Thank you,” Kiyoko-san says, blinking away sleep as she puts them on. “You didn’t have to stay.”

“I—” Hitoka stops, and flushes. “I wanted to.” She can _feel_ how red she is, and the miraculous color on Kiyoko-san’s face is the same, each of them averting their eyes as Hitoka rises to her feet. “I’ll, um, I’ll go—I’ll go see what Saeko-san needs doing.”

Hitoka flees the room before Kiyoko-san can tell her to leave, bag thudding against the small of her back as it swings over her shoulder.

 

 

 

She skids to a stop when she hears voices, new voices, in the house. Saeko-san knows so many people.

“Hisashi, you’re late,” Chikara-san says, voice tight.

“Kazuhito wouldn’t come,” a new voice replies. They’re _right there_ , just beyond the corner and in the corridor where Hitoka’s room is, three meters away. She doesn’t mean to eavesdrop—but they’re so involved in their own conversation, three heads put together with Chikara-san in the middle, sleepy face awake with irritation.

“You owe Kiyoko-san an apology.” Chikara-san jabs a finger in someone’s stomach—Kazuhito-san, maybe—and Hitoka covers her face, tries not to listen. “She had to find another way out because you weren’t at your post.”

“I’m sorry,” the third voice mumbles. “I screwed up.”

“Tell it to her,” Chikara-san sighs. “She’s not herself since Michimiya-san’s been gone.”

“Yeah, she stole a girl _and_ a car,” Hisashi-san chips in, and Hitoka tries to make herself very, very small. She folds up her legs and sit-crouches in a tiny ball of limbs, body pressed against the wall, hopes nobody sees her at all. “Ryuu says she’s _from_ the city—”

“I’ll freeze his jaw shut,” Chikara-san replies, scowling as he turns back to Kazuhito-san. “We’re all apologizing to Kiyoko-san before this is over, and you’re going first.”

“Yeah,” Kazuhito-san agrees, sighing. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

And there’s nothing but silence after that, a silence so long that Hitoka thinks she might have lost hours in the seconds it passes by. With trembling fingers, Hitoka uncovers her face and peeks out, into the hallway beyond, praying quietly to herself _please don’t still be there, please somehow be gone, please don’t catch me, i’m sorry, i didn’t mean to eavesdrop_ —

—which is utterly and entirely empty.

“Metahumans,” Hitoka breathes out, relief pouring through her veins. “Of course they are.”

 

 

 

Kazuhito-san does apologize.

“I’m sorry!” He folds himself at the waist, at a perfect ninety-degree angle that surprises Kiyoko-san in its sudden fierceness. “I wasn’t there when I said I would be, and I caused you trouble for it. Please accept my humblest apologies.”

“Please accept our humblest apologies,” Chikara-san echoes, and bows, too, at the waist, Hisashi-san doing the same.

Hitoka begins to realize exactly how Kiyoko-san was meant to leave, having seen Hisashi-san appear from thin air, invisibility melting off him like peeling paint. Kazuhito-san, too, has the metahuman gene, apparent in how he teleports himself everywhere; it’s thoughtless and immediate, like Yuu-san bending the world to conform around his iron will and Kiyoko-san soldering metal.

She wonders what she’d be doing, if Kiyoko-san were to teleport out of the city the way she was meant to that day, if Hitoka’s car would have started at all.

“Get up,” Kiyoko-san says softly, and Saeko-san has her arms crossed, staring them down as if they’d wronged her instead. “We’re getting Michimiya out, and that’s how you’ll pay me back. Today.”

 _Jailbreak_ skirts around Hitoka’s head, and everyone around her just looks so serious about it, fear the farthest thing from their minds as it threatens to swallow Hitoka’s whole.

Outside, she can hear the crows caw.

 

 

 

The crows watch as they slowly file out of the house, pale dawn giving way to another hot sky.

“Tsukishima-kun would have been useful,” Saeko-san sighs, and Chikara-san cracks a smile.

“I hear he’s been giving Kageyama-kun nightmares. I don’t think he’ll be putting anyone to sleep soon.” Yuu-san mouths at Hitoka, _dreamweaver_ , an unusual grimness to his features.

Hitoka almost believes that they can do it—if there’s any group of people in the world who could, maybe these people can. She slides into the passenger seat of her own car, Kiyoko-san slamming shut the hood of it before sliding behind the wheel. Hisashi-san had taken off first, or maybe just rendered himself invisible early on; Chikara-san lets Kazuhito-san wrap a hand around his wrist, and they disappear like that, without a trace. When he comes back, Chikara-san isn’t with him.

Yuu-san and Ryuu-san, too, go like that—Kiyoko-san is the only one left, Saeko-san standing alone, in front of her house, without a single cyborg or metahuman there. She waves as Kazuhito-san comes back for a final time.

“You’re sure?” he asks, and Kiyoko-san remains in the car.

Her reply sounds almost more for herself than for him. “Positive.”

As he disappears, Kiyoko-san guns both engines, smooth lift rumbling to life under her hands. Even without the ignition key, the car starts for her. Hitoka understands.

The crows watch them go, hovercar’s motors the only sound in the brown wasteland.

 

* * *

 

The plan is beautifully simple: Kazuhito-san takes Michimiya-san away as soon as Hisashi-san renders her invisible, Ryuu-san and Yuu-san ready to break anything apart in the meantime. Hitoka’s seen how Kiyoko-san is with machines; she’s there for electrical support, as it were, and Hitoka’s the getaway driver.

None of its simplicity makes her feel any better.

“It looks like it’ll rain,” Hitoka comments, and Kiyoko-san peers up at the thick clouds above, windshield lending a blue tint to the overcast sky.

“We should have asked Koushi about the weather,” she agrees, and Hitoka turns to look at her, curious. “He doesn’t control it,” Kiyoko-san shrugs. “He just. Sees a little farther than most.”

“Oh. _Oh._ ”

“He’s sweet about it,” Kiyoko-san adds, and Hitoka’s consistently amazed at the vastness of this community, wonders what it must be like to see the future. “He’s how we knew where Michimiya is.”

“I see,” she says faintly, and doesn’t, quite. There’s still so much that she doesn’t know. Kiyoko-san is usually so quiet, but her silence today is heavier. She doesn’t clarify anything, doesn’t describe any other clairvoyants she knows; Kiyoko-san just subsides into wordlessness, and Hitoka drowns in it.

It’s a long drive.

 

 

 

It rains when Kiyoko-san finally parks the car, Hisashi-san appearing from thin air. “We waited,” he says, soaked through and slightly shivering. There’s only one building looming tall and grey-blocked in the forefront, Kiyoko-san’s mouth a tight, thin line as she stares at it. He touches a hand to the hood of the car, and Hitoka watches as the metal under his hands slowly disappears.

“You too,” and he offers her a crooked smile and an open hand, palm left skyward as Hitoka takes it.

Invisibility feels very much like being visible.

“It’s not gonna last long,” Hisashi-san adds, and Kiyoko-san looks at the space where Hitoka is. “We’ll be quick about it.”

And when Kiyoko-san leaves, it’s with her genetically-modified touch; she closes the car door and it doesn’t make a sound, lock clicking in place.

Hitoka watches her go, and waits.

 

* * *

  

She can hear _explosions_ masked underneath the raging storm. Thunder cracks open the sky, and Hitoka huddles down in her seat, praying _please be alive, please be alive, please be safe, please don’t let lightning strike the car,_ and it is hours, or months, or minutes.

Chikara-san, Ryuu-san, Yuu-san, Hisashi-san, Kinoshita-san: she says a quiet prayer for them all, with a fierce belief that she hadn’t known she had, Kiyoko-san’s solemn face and her machine-greased hands a ghost in Hitoka’s mind’s eye. “!!!”

When lightning splits the sky again in half, she can see someone emerging from the invisibility that Hisashi-san had provided: Kiyoko-san and a woman, someone limping with rain beating down her metal limbs, and single, glowing eye. _Michimiya-san_ , who clings to Kiyoko-san’s form as Kinoshita-san wraps a hand around her battered wrist.

They disappear quickly, and Hitoka already has the engines running.

“Drive,” is the first thing from Kiyoko-san’s mouth, a tired gasp that Hitoka registers after she floors it. “Please,” she adds, and Hitoka can’t help herself—there’s what looks like an electrical burn on her left hand, slender fingers scarred an angry red and a fresh bruise on her face.

“You’re safe,” she says softly, hands still shaking as she drives, does exactly what Kiyoko-san asks of her.

“We all are.” The sky is still an ominous dark, and the rain makes it impossible to see. “We’re going home.”

 _We’re the traceable ones,_ Hitoka thinks, and tries not to think about it at all. _We’re the ones leaving tracks behind, but Kinoshita-san will get Michimiya-san back, and if we’re caught, we’ll be put in jail, but it’s okay, because we won’t. With them, I believe it_ —if she repeats it frequently enough, Hitoka might begin to.

 

* * *

  

Saeko-san is still up when they come back, the long, low house appearing in the desert like a miracle.

“You’re the last of us,” she says, and hands Hitoka a towel. “Ryuu’s trying to fix her up,” and it’s meant for Kiyoko-san, Saeko-san’s usual energy dampened by the atmosphere. “We could use you.”

“Yes.” Kiyoko-san is still in wet clothes, and Hitoka tries to hand her the towel as she brushes past them both. “No, I’m fine.” But Hitoka’s tired, too. She presses it into Kiyoko-san’s hands until her fingers curl around the fabric.

“Chikara-kun’s having a field day,” Saeko-san sighs, following them to a room that Hitoka’s never seen before. It’s clearly a workshop, metal sheeting strewn here and there with Ryuu-san hunched over someone—Michimiya-san, her eyes closed as if asleep, body resting on a long table. “Did he ice you down?”

“Yeah,” Ryuu-san grunts, and Yuu-san hands him another piece of metal, folded into a neat box with his bare hands. “Thanks.”

“I got it,” Kiyoko-san offers, draping the towel around her neck. “She was awake earlier,” she says, voice gentle, and takes the little thing from Ryuu-san’s metal hands. “I think it’s just—the place, they were going to—”

Hitoka watches as she steels herself, Kiyoko-san no longer looking quite so dangerous as she appears, simply fragile, and unscrews the panels of Michimiya-san’s chest with shaky hands. She works in utter silence, Ryuu-san watching inscrutably as Kiyoko-san lifts out a mess of wires, begins fusing them together one by one, without tools.

Slowly, Michimiya-san’s eyes open. The flare of her iriscam eyes are brown, and panicked. “?!”

“No voice box,” Saeko-san clarifies, and drops a reassuring hand atop hers. The metal must be cold to the touch, Chikara-san’s work evident in the frosted joints. Hitoka feels oddly small, someone entirely unknown in a room full of family members and a hospital bed. “Kiyoko-san’s got it.”

“Careful,” Kiyoko-san breathes, fusing together the last of the wires and threading them through the little box. They stay corralled together like that, and Kiyoko-san is already affixing her chestplates back together. “Now, try.”

Her voice is ragged. “Shimizu—” Michimiya-san coughs, the noise metallic and scratchy. “I’m home,” she says, and diodes flicker to life down her arms.

Hitoka understands, now, what Kiyoko-san had meant by it: they really do look like stars. It makes so much more sense now that she sees it, Kiyoko-san’s head bent together with Michimiya-san’s, black hair falling over her shoulder as it bends down to rest, forehead to forehead, with relief. “Michimiya,” Kiyoko-san sighs, like a little secret, “ _Yui—_ ”

“You brought me home,” and her voice is clearer with every word, shedding the last of its machinelike raggedness, “I’m home.” Michimiya-san’s brown eyes bounce around the room, categorizing its familiarities before landing back on Kiyoko-san’s face in a hurry.

 

 

 

When Michimiya-san attaches her mouth to Kiyoko-san’s, it still makes sense.

Saeko-san is already gone, dragging Ryuu-san out of the room, and it’s as if Hitoka is still invisible, Hisashi-san’s metahuman power also somehow her own.

“And you,” Michimiya-san’s voice cuts through the fog in her head, the purge of guilt in her stomach. “You kept her safe, didn’t you?” Warm brown eyes and metallic hands, cold to the touch, with diodes like stars. Michimiya-san’s mouth, warm from Kiyoko-san’s, is on Hitoka’s too, impetuous. Brief. Machines, Hitoka thinks distantly, don’t kiss this way; people do.

“ _Thank you_ ,” Michimiya-san whispers against Hitoka’s mouth, and tilts up her head to kiss Hitoka again on the forehead, a benediction, “Thank you.”

Hitoka doesn’t know if she should go, this time, or stay; Kiyoko-san’s eyes look wet, and Hitoka does what she can, tries not to shake. _My first kiss went to a cyborg girl, and Kiyoko-san is crying_ , in that order, so Hitoka hands her her only handkerchief, with its crumpled corner, from her bag.

The _jailbreak_ —the event, the Kissing, Hitoka can’t separate any of it anymore—means that Ryuu-san and Yuu-san are nervous in the house. “They’ll be like that for a bit,” Saeko-san sighs, Hitoka dropping her sketchbook at the sound of something breaking. “Humans in the city,” she grins, bending down to pick up Hitoka’s sketchbook, “Get nervous when a robot breaks outta jail.”

Flustered, Hitoka accepts the sketchbook with both hands. “But she’s not a threat to anyone.” The last thing she’s drawn is Yuu-san, with his hair frozen in tall peaks with an approving smile, his tension briefly melting at Chikara-san’s little joke.

“Everyone here is,” Saeko-san shrugs. “We keep to ourselves, but we learned how to be dangerous for a reason.” She smiles crookedly. “Even you.”

Hitoka claps shut her sketchbook, sweating nervously at the thought. _Dear mom,_ she thinks, _I think I may have become ‘dangerous’._

 

* * *

  

The only danger that Michimiya-san poses to anyone is herself. Hitoka picks up things about her, details that Michimiya-san leaves strewn around the place with her presence: there’s something about Michimiya-san that draws her in. She wants to draw her, too, and her steel-set shoulders as she frowns down at her own leg, detached at the hip and laid out across her half-lap. She swears colorfully, with a vocabulary borrowed from Saeko-san’s toolbox, as Kiyoko-san dutifully hands her wrenches.

“Should we go see Tanaka-san?” Kiyoko-san’s voice is dry, and amused, a wonder of the world that Hitoka grins at despite herself and her uncertainties.

“No way,” Michimiya-san replies, ratcheting in her kneecap. She waves her leg in the air, far above her head, checking it for loose joints. "It's just a few loose nuts in here," she argues. Kiyoko-san's fond little huff is answer enough.

Michimiya-san bolts her leg back to its original socket with a deftness that even Kiyoko-san lacks, grinning as she stands up. “Check me out!” she laughs, bending her legs. “Look!” and when Michimiya-san smiles at Hitoka like that, radiant and bright, Hitoka laughs.

 

* * *

  

But Kiyoko-san is almost at a loss about it now, without a purpose to drive her forward. Hitoka sees less of her in the house, Kiyoko-san preferring to stay shut up in the workshop instead, Saeko-san closemouthed and anxious.

It brews in Hitoka’s system, too, the haze of utter unreality threatening to break loose as she confronts the very real possibility that this, all of this, is not some elaborate dream. That the sketches she’s put in her book are just figments of her imagination, a familiar panic creeping up her spine. _What did I do wrong? What can I do better?_ Hitoka loiters in front of the workshop, never quite brave enough to knock.

Clouded in her own anxiety, she crashes into Michimiya-san right at the door of the workshop. “Woah, watch out—”

Hitoka jumps, heartbeat a nervous fluttering bird in her ribcage. “Michimiya-san,” she gasps, “You—I’m sorry, you startled me.”

“Please,” and her voice has come such a long way since the ragged noises from mere days ago, “It’s Yui.” She has her hands on Hitoka’s waist, to steady her, and Hitoka rebalances herself as she tries to catch her breath.

“Yui-san,” Hitoka repeats, her anxiety slowly bleeding out. Yui-san’s hands are, despite their metallicity, warm. “I, um, I just wanted to—I have a camera, I wanted to fix it.”

It’s not a lie. The desert’s done a number on it, lens cap fitted tightly to the sensitive glass to prevent further damage; Hitoka fumbles for the bag across her shoulder, hefts up her prize nervously.

“Woah,” Yui-san breathes reverently, iriscam brown fixing on the camera as she takes her hands off Hitoka’s waist. “Analog.” Hitoka wonders what it must be like to see the world through camera eyes. "You should give that stuff to Shimizu,” Yui-san continues, grinning. “She’s genius at that stuff.”

“Ahaaaa,” Hitoka manages nervously, shuffling. “Do you think she’d—you don’t think she’d mind?”

Times like this, Hitoka can see how Yui-san’s AI works; it codes a bright flash behind her eyes, an unearthly green that fades behind the brown. She’s thinking. “I think,” she starts, “She might want to. Shimizu feels guilty about you,” Yui-san sighs, and stops. “Wait, no. She feels guilty? About? What she did to you.”

“What—” _what does that mean, guilty about what she did to me, I’m the one who messed up, I’m the strange one—_

“She thinks,” and Yui-san’s voice is melodic, but serious, “She’s brought you here, where we’re all, well, like this.” Yui-san gestures down to herself. “And you, you’re soft. And normal.”

“I’m not,” Hitoka laughs, a little hysterical at the thought: she’s always been the square peg, the odd one out, the one looking for space where there is none. Yui-san watches as Hitoka starts to shake again, gripping her camera tightly in her hands until her knuckles turn white. She folds her arms around Hitoka’s waist, joint servos humming softly against Hitoka’s bones as she shushes her, with what feel like tears leaking out from Hitoka’s eyes, Yui-san’s voice mumbling in her ear, _oh, honey, we’ll fix it_. Rain falls on her face while Hitoka anchors herself to the sound of Yui-san's voice, believes in the absolute faith she puts in her words, _we'll fix it, I promise_.

The next day, Hitoka sees Kiyoko-san again, for the first time in what feels like ages. She’s by the car, taking sludge out of its engines, Yui-san sitting in the passenger seat with the door propped open.

She’s humming, and flashes Hitoka a thumbs up. “We’re going for a drive,” she announces, and hops out of the seat with a grin. “If you please,” Yui-san says, and Kiyoko-san closes up the car’s hood with a final, satisfied slam.

“Hitoka-chan,” her voice quiet and tired, guilt-clouded eyes greyer than usual. Yui-san must have said something to her, since Hitoka had woken up that morning with her camera working perfectly, shutter speed practically the speed of light. “I’m fixing it,” she says, determined, and Hitoka doesn’t know how to tell her that there isn’t anything broken.

Her camera rests in her bag, in prime condition, out of film. Hitoka slides into the back seat of her own car, Kiyoko-san starting it with a simple touch.

And she drives. Yui-san’s humming stops when Kiyoko-san gets the car far enough, Saeko-san’s house a speck on the horizon. Crows track the car, wheeling abovehead before breaking away, and the desert gives way to more desert.

 

 

 

There’s something familiar on the horizon, tall peaks that are too flat to be mountains, and too angular to be hills.

Hitoka can see, in the far distance, something green. Instead of relief, or joy, what fills her head and her body is a low, seeping dread. _No, no, no,_ Kiyoko-san is driving back toward the city where she’s grown up all her life. _This isn’t right, this isn’t good, this isn’t what I wanted—_

Yui-san turns around, iriscam brown flashing green with a deep sympathy as if to say, _you’re almost home_.

“Turn back,” Hitoka says quietly, and Kiyoko-san’s heavy propulsion foot lifts a little. The engine hums, feedback reflecting her indecision, and Hitoka raises her voice. “Please, turn back!”

The car slows.

“Is this what you meant by _fix it_ —” and for once, she’s angry, too angry to be scared, scared of a metahuman and a cyborg. Her nails dig against the warm flesh of her palms, skin and blood, a whole world apart from these two, but Hitoka knows what she wants, and it’s not this.

“I,” she says, hiccuping for breath, “I don’t want to be without you.” It’s not clear what she means; Hitoka doesn’t know who she’s directing it to, either of the girls in the car, or both. The wasteland is a dry, dead place, but she’s _free_ here, and she’ll write her mother a letter, one day, about how there’s no place for escape—not even from herself. She’s less anxious in the desert, what she’ll lose so much clearer in her sights, the terms and conditions of her life clearly spelled out.

“Let’s go back.” Yui-san’s eyes are alight at her words, but Kiyoko-san grips the wheel, car slowing to ‘lift’ without propulsion. “Please,” and she’s pleading with her now, with Kiyoko-san’s hesitation.

Sirens blare in the horizon. Hitoka knows that her car must be tagged by the police, her name maybe somewhere beside her picture, _jailbreak_ and _arrest_ and _accomplice_ nearby. Hitoka’s voice cracks as she pounds small fists at the headrest, Kiyoko-san’s resolve weakening. “Let’s go home, Kiyoko-san.”

Yui-san’s laughter breaks through Kiyoko-san’s silence, taking Hitoka aback. “You heard the girl,” and Yui-san’s metal fist pounds at the dashboard. “Drive!”

“We’ll have to go the long way,” Kiyoko-san replies, and the knot that’s tied itself in Hitoka’s stomach for days is unraveling. She’s grinning—her face hurts, but Hitoka twists around to see the police cars growing ever smaller, Yui-san’s wild laughter like music in her ears. They’ll make it back home.

 

 

 

Even crows in the desert, Hitoka reasons, need a place to nest.

**Author's Note:**

> title and summary from the patrick watson song 'closer to paradise'. thanks to a, a, k, l, and w for looking this over ♥


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